Inside Nature: Henry Gee at the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology

Jack Ashby, Learning and Access Manager at the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology, reflects on the working life of one of the gatekeepers of the world’s scientific knowledge: Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee, who spoke at the museum on 26 October.

“Although by far
the strongest emotion I experienced whilst programming and marketing Henry
Gee’s talk was excitement – in the fact that we had an engaging, funny and
influential scientist visiting – I was also nervous that it could all go
horribly wrong.

Dr Henry Gee is
Senior Editor (Biological Sciences) for Nature.
Along with the other Senior Editors, he is the guy who receives people’s
article submissions for one of the most distinguished journals in the world and
decides whether to accept or reject them. As such he is a gatekeeper for what
the world gets to hear about – an extremely powerful person.

According to
Henry, who gave a talk at the Grant Museum of Zoology to give an insight to his
work, Nature receives 200 manuscripts per week –
that’s 10,400 every year – but of these only ten a week get published. In other
words, authors have a 95% failure rate at getting across Henry’s desk. He
freely admits that he ruins people’s prospects of tenure. What I was nervous
about was that people would want revenge.

Prior to the Grant
Museum’s public events I ask colleagues working in relevant disciplines to send
on notices about the event to their departments. On this occasion I got several
replies along the lines of ‘Looks good, Jack – will you be providing the rotten
tomatoes or should we bring our own?‘

In the end the
audience was gentle, and noone lambasted him for rejecting their papers. Henry
was extremely candid about the process for accepting manuscripts, as well as
his likening of the physics editors to Orcs (and he would know – one of his
books is called The Science of Middle Earth) and
biochemistry to bad cooking (you can’t eat the results).

For me, the take-home
messages were that editors can’t read every word of every paper; they reject
four out of five papers without taking any advice, and they have to accept what
people tell them as the truth.

What journal
editors do is rather impressive. Henry, like many before him, noted that
scientists have a very deep knowledge of a very narrow area (he himself has a
PhD in how to tell cow fossil bones from bison bones), whilst journalists have
a very shallow knowledge of pretty much everything. This means they have to
accept or reject a paper without knowing much about the field it’s based in.
After training as a palaeontologist, the first article he received when he
started at Nature was about radiological
protection techniques.

I guess some could
be annoyed by the fact that someone who doesn’t know the first thing about it
rejected their paper, but actually I’m reassured. The rigour of the science
isn’t the only thing that matters. To be a good paper, at the end of reading it
some significant finding has to stay with you. Papers only get in ‘if they will
change the world in some fundamental way’. That’s quite a big ask – and
explains why only five percent make it.”

To find out more about the UCL Grant Museum and its events, follow the links at the top of this article.

Image: Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee

UCL context

The UCL Grant Museum of Zoology is the only remaining university
zoological museum in London. It houses around 67,000 specimens, covering
the whole animal kingdom. Founded in 1828 as a teaching collection, the museum is packed full of skeletons, mounted animals and specimens
preserved in fluid. Many of the species are now endangered or extinct
including the Tasmanian Tiger or Thylacine, the Quagga, and the Dodo.

The Grant Museum has selection of spectacular glass models
made by the Blaschka family in the late 1800s. The museum also contains
many of Robert Grant’s original specimens as well as those of Thomas
Henry Huxley. The Grant Museum’s collection of Sir Victor Negus’s
bisected heads are both arresting and beautiful and are reminiscent of
the work of the artist Damien Hirst.